Facebook is getting its own data center

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Servers can tell you a lot about a website. As a site grows it could go from a cheap shared hosting package (or a simple cloud server), to dedicated server, to multiple load-balanced dedicated servers with CDN caching, and on from there. Maybe one day a site could have its own rack at a collocation facility. But what about sites as big as Facebook? They open up an entire data center.

Today on Facebook’s blog a post was put up about Facebook’s new data center. It actually broke ground today in Prineville, Oregon, an excellent area for such a facility as it’s known for its cheap power and geological stability. It’s not too far from Google’s famous facility in The Dalles.

The post talks a lot about Facebook’s goals for power efficiency, which makes complete sense given the power requirements of such an operation, in addition to the standard commitment to be being green that comes along with all announcements these days.

Green technologies will include (from the post):

Evaporative cooling system: This system evaporates water to cool the incoming air, as opposed to traditional chiller systems that require more energy intensive equipment. This process is highly energy efficient and minimizes water consumption by using outside air.

Airside economizer: The facility will be cooled by simply bringing in colder air from the outside. This feature will operate for between 60 percent and 70 percent of the year. The remainder of the year requires the use of the evaporative cooling system to meet temperature and humidity requirements.

Re-use of server heat: A portion of the excess heat created by the computer servers will be captured and used to heat office space in the facility during the colder months.

Proprietary Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) technology: All data centers must have an uninterruptible power supply to continuously provide power to servers. The Prineville data center will use a new, patent-pending UPS system that reduces electricity usage by as much as 12 percent.

Read more at Facebook. If you are interested in the subject don’t miss DataCenterKnowlege’s post. The site gets into some specific facts about the LEED certification, why certain decisions were made, and a clever UPS design that uses 12V batteries to power the servers.